Tuesday, June 24, 2014

§FEMALE/MALE REPRESENTATIONThis, we are made to understand, is how you become a heroine, a tomb raider. Our lead characters have to be hard, and while we accept a male hero with a five o'clock shadow and a bad attitude generally unquestioned, a woman seems to need a reason to be hard. Something had to have been done to her.
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When you want to make a woman into a hero, you hurt her first. When you want to make a man into a hero, you hurt… also a woman first.
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"Sherlock Holmes gets to be brilliant, solitary, abrasive, Bohemian, whimsical, brave, sad, manipulative, neurotic, vain, untidy, fastidious, artistic, courteous, rude, a polymath genius. Female characters get to be Strong." Further, we seem to have problematic ideas of how women become Strong -- men break them, we assume.
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Abstracted ideas about post-traumatic stress disorder or the catch-all "mental health issues" are common in games -- apparently the logic is if we're trying to advance narratives in action games, we need to find nuanced rationales for why we're killing so many people with aplomb.http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/219074/What_did_they_do_to_you_Our_women_heroes_problem.php

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you’ve got a situation where female characters do get scrutinized more than male characters do, and in some ways can be seen as holding a banner up for female characters. A lot gets heaped on their shoulders. Lara Croft gets a lot more scrutiny than Nathan Drake does, as a female.
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male characters aren’t shown as being scared or vulnerable, why should female characters? Well, just because it hasn’t been done with male characters doesn’t make it wrong! It’s probably more of a problem of the way we depict male characters.
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It’s very difficult to keep that good affable character when they’re having to slaughter loads of people. But what we tried to do with Lara was at least have the first death count. As you say, she’s uncomfortable with having to do what she needs to do. Those feelings start to bubble to the surface, and she does sort of push them away because she knows she can’t think about what she’s doing. It will incapacitate her if does.http://killscreendaily.com/articles/interviews/tomb-raider-writer-rhianna-pratchett-why-every-kill-cant-be-first-and-why-she-wanted-make-lara-croft-gay/

Dynaheir, a proud, strong woman, is killed so her associated man can have motivation. Khalid is killed so that Jaheira, a proud, strong woman, can become the player’s girlfriend. The two fridgings differ in many ways, but are similar in that they both treat women as plot devices, and as prizes to be won or lost.http://ontologicalgeek.com/you-must-stuff-your-fridge-before-venturing-forth/

§MISC ARTICLESPost-apocalyptic games, from Fallout to The Last of Us or Metro 2033, play to expectations. When one hears “post-apocalyptic,” the word conjures up images of half-destroyed tower blocks, highways filled with empty, rusting cars, basically the remains of the now dead civilization. But those images are more apocalyptic, really. The post-apocalypse what happens after the reset button has been pressed. Unfortunately, a great number of games that use the setting give the uniform answer of “not much at all.”http://www.awesomeoutof10.com/no-fresh-starts-what-the-post-apocalypse-can-offer-but-doesnt/

§The Spiny Shell is the most profoundly existentialist element of the Mario canon. It disrupts the entire logic of this familiar fantasy universe. We were told we could jump on things to destroy them! We were told we could flip them asunder! But no - all promises are tentative, even in the Mushroom Kingdom. Spiny Shells are chaos, unfairness, injustice. For those of us who were kids when Super Mario Bros. arrived, the Spiny Shell taught a lesson, and the lesson was: you are alone in the universe. Enough with your childish expectations. This is the real world, and just when you think you've mastered it, it'll pull the rug out from under you. You have to find your own way.http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/218696/The_Blue_Shell_and_its_Discontents.php